Weather and emergency alerts are issued to advise the public of time critical emergency alerts in time for them to take the best possible actions to protect life and property. The systems to accomplish the reception and distribution of alert messages can be as simple as a VHF analog radio, to as complex as an offsite server based messaging system.
The instant invention teaches many monitoring systems that keep users of the system automatically appraised of the instantaneous status and reliability of the system, as well as methods to provide numerous, independent, parallel pathways for the alert messages to reach the recipients.
The National Weather Service (hereinafter “NWS”) uses great skill and advanced technology, to predict the weather and then to issue warnings, using many communications systems, to alert the public of approaching severe weather emergencies. The NWS operates a system of over 1,000 VHF FM transmitters located throughout the United States on frequencies 162.400 to 162.550 MHz in a system named NOAA Weather Radio (hereinafter “NWR”). This radio system reaches over 95% of the United States population. NOAA is the acronym for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which the parent agency of the NWS.
NWR has a normal repeating program loop of approximately 10 minutes of weather information. This normal broadcast is interrupted as necessary when severe weather warnings are issued.
Since the 1970's the NWS has tone alerted severe weather information with an analog 8-13 second tone of 1050 Hz which preceded the broadcast of a severe weather alert. This tone is called the Wide Area Tone (hereinafter “WAT”) as it normally covers the approximately 40 mile radius from each NWR transmitter, which usually includes many cities and counties not involved in the alert. The WAT would thereby interrupt people who did not need to be interrupted. As a result they have often turned off their NWR receivers as it had become more annoying than useful.
For these reasons, in about 1996, the NWS implemented a frequency shift keying (hereinafter “FSK”) audio based alerting system called Specific Area Message Encoding (hereinafter “SAME”) which is compatible with the FCC's national Emergency Alerting System (hereinafter “EAS”). The EAS' primary goal is to transmit an emergency message from the President of the United States to the people through the broadcasters. The WAT is still also transmitted by the NWS on NWR after the SAME alert message to maintain backwards system compatibility.
The NWS' SAME system is received by the broadcasters' EAS equipment that monitor NWR and the broadcasters', in turn, can choose to forward and or broadcast the alert message on their communications channels. NWR is one of the fastest and most reliable methods of receiving severe weather alerts directly from NWS. A special VHF radio receiver is needed to receive NWS NWR alerts. Only about 10% of the United States population owns a NWR radio. Often, a commercial grade NWR receiver is required for reliable reception of NWR SAME alerts at far distances from a NWR transmitter and also in areas of high radio frequency (hereinafter “RF”) noise and in other poor reception environments. These poor reception environments often include factories, government facilities, hospitals, amusement parks, and emergency operations centers. Each of these places also has critical needs to reliably receive severe weather alerts in order to protect lives and property.
A number of reliable improvements to commercial grade NWR receivers have been developed, and are in wide use throughout the United States in demanding applications, often being interfaced to other communications system. Some of these NWR improvements include: U.S. Pat. No. 5,444,433 to Gropper for Modular Emergency or Weather Alert Interface System; U.S. Pat. No. 5,574,999 to Gropper for Alert Receiver; U.S. Pat. No. 5,781,852 to Gropper for Alert Receiver Interface; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,323,767 to Gropper for Diagnostic FSK receiver for decoding EAS and same with user definable translations.
While these advanced commercial radios and interface systems have vastly improved the reliability of the reception of NWR weather alerts, the software used to interface these radios to other communications systems has previously been required to operate on the client's computer systems. This has required extensive ongoing interaction with the client's IT departments and has made troubleshooting an ongoing challenge. Further, firewalls rightly make external access to the status of the NWR equipment and software an extreme ongoing challenge. Before the instant invention, there has not been a good way of automatically monitoring the up to the moment status of these critical systems and to be able to identify, notify and correct the system issue efficiently.
There have been a number of other patents that have attempted to address some components of these alert distribution and reliability issues. These include U.S. Pat. No. 7,873,344 to Bowser, et. al, for System and method to distribute emergency information which uses computers (108, 110, 112) to subscribe to alert device 102 to receive alerts. In this embodiment, the alert device 102 sends the heartbeat signal to learn if the computers are online. We have found in practice that firewalls will often prevent the automatic re-creation of a disconnected network communication connection. In the instant invention, acknowledging the existence and challenge working around and through firewalls, all devices taught herein are configured to automatically connect outbound to the remote computer and ping the remote computer on a regular timed basis with a digital string. Each of these devices, including, but not limited to, the alert receiver, the printers and LED signboards all automatically try to reconnect to the remote computer. In this manner, if a connection is lost, as will likely happen overtime, each unit will repeatedly and automatically try to reconnect to the remote computer to try to re-establish the communication link. Additionally, if the remote computer does not receive a timely ping from a field unit, the remote computer closes its Ethernet socket for that device and begins the listening mode for the incoming signal to attempt to reestablish the communications link. The sending and receiving firewalls are preferably set to only permit point to point connections to enhance security. Additionally, the remote computer will immediately know if the remote unit has stopped pinging, despite the sever socket remaining open, and it will be able to immediately restart the connection process, as well as inform a monitor application that a communication connection that has been lost. The instant invention overcomes a number of defects in the system taught by Bowser.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,802,173 to Chan et al. provides an algorithm to parse the National Weather Service's SAME FSK codes. A key drawback in the algorithms suggested in this patent are the teaching that the alert messages have an important and unimportant components. Each item of information in the alert string is critical to the correct decoding and analysis of an alert message. The algorithm taught by the instant patent application is to parse the message into its many component parts, starting with separating the three SAME bursts of information. Then the algorithm taught herein will attempt to match the parts of the message based on the type of characters, such as ASCII numbers versus letters, that are supposed to appear in each section of the message. The algorithm will then compare the decoded parts of the alert message to similar parts in each alert message in the other bursts. If no match is found, the algorithm places the decoded section in the output message string together with “?” which indicates that a no match was found. These two indications of a questionably decoded message provide an important indication to the end user that a message might not have decoded properly, in addition to providing important troubleshooting hints to the end user as to why which parts of the message were thought not to decode properly.